


V. The Eraser

by notablyindigo



Series: The Better Half [5]
Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Alcohol, Anxiety, Multi, Substance Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-26
Updated: 2014-02-26
Packaged: 2018-01-13 21:20:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1241152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notablyindigo/pseuds/notablyindigo





	V. The Eraser

In the two weeks following Mr. Castoro’s death, Joan doesn’t sleep, though “can’t sleep” is the more apt description. She finds herself at the end of the day tired but wide awake, Ty breathing softly beside her while she holds staring matches with the ceiling. 

She thinks that maybe this is normal—part of the grieving process—but by the fourth night without sleep she is beginning to feel again the crumpled-paper-bag sort of tiredness she’d learned to live with during her intern year. She recalls a period of several weeks during that year when she strung together days with hour-long naps in the on-call room, and how by the end she had started hallucinating ripples in the floor. On the wards at the hospital after the accident (mistake, it was a mistake), she notices looks being thrown her way by the other doctors and nurses, a mixture of pity and disgust, and wonders if she’s hallucinating this too. 

She picks up running, a habit she’d never really cared to cultivate before, in the hopes that she’ll be able to tire herself out, but she runs mile after mile only to find herself pacing the floorboards again as the sun rises. 

Joan knows Ty has called her mother about her insomnia when a FedEx package arrives at the apartment containing a packet of herbal tea. She’d included a hand-written note containing detailed instructions on how to brew the tea, at what water temperature and for how long. Joan tries it a few times, and finds that instead of making her sleepy, it just makes her sluggish. She thanks her mother appropriately and quietly stashes the tea at the back of a little-used kitchen cabinet, just in case. 

It’s at the end of her first sleepless week, when she notices Ty pouring himself a second cup of coffee in the morning, that she realizes that her insomnia has been affecting him too. “I’ll move to the guest room,” she decides aloud over breakfast, and that evening she makes up a bed for herself on the pull-out couch in spite of Ty’s protests.

"This is weird," he says as they brush their teeth, but Joan’s already made up her mind. 

By the ninth day, she’s caught herself thinking longingly of the bottle of cough syrup in the medicine cabinet, and on day eleven, she has to actively talk herself out of filching a sample pack of Ambien from the pharmacy. She drinks large glasses of wine before bed, and begins to understand how people end up losing themselves to narcotics. 

The empty evenings wouldn’t be so bad if only she could read, but she finds herself unable to concentrate on anything for long. She begins leaving on the TV for company, sits through hour after hour of late night shows, old Cheers re-runs, and the home shopping network on low volume. Sometimes it lulls her into enough of a stupor that she’s able to rest, if not actual sleep, but mostly it leaves her eyes dry and aching, and fills her head with various earworm advertising jingles (she finds herself humming “call 1-800-Steaaaaamer” one morning as she’s doing the dishes, and decides that maybe TV isn’t the fix after all). 

She remembers what her mother once said about Joan’s first week at home, how between feeding changing soothing her brand new baby and worrying over her increasingly absent, erratic husband she’d discovered a previously unknown level of exhaustion. Joan wanders, zombielike, around the dark apartment and wonders what it would be like to give life instead of taking it away. 

"Have you thought about seeing a doctor?" Ty asks on the twelfth evening as they lay together on the couch. 

"I am a doctor," Joan replies reflexively, and Ty sighs. 

"Yeah, but I’m not talking about seeing a surgeon. I mean talking to someone who specializes in sleep, or something…" He trails off. 

Or something. Joan raises herself up on her elbow to look at him. 

"Are you saying I should see a psychiatrist?" she asks, and she can’t help the offended tone that creeps into her voice. Ty puts his hands up defensively. 

"I’m just saying that if you won’t talk to me about it, maybe talking to someone else will help," he says.

"There’s nothing to talk about," Joan says under her breath, but even as she says the words she knows they’re not true. She thinks of the way her heart pounds, blood rushing loud and fast in her ears, every time she lays down in bed, of the nausea that sets in each night. (Later, she will talk about how Mr. Castoro went into his anesthesia-induced sleep fully expecting to wake up, how he never did, and about how even thinking about holding a scalpel makes her dizzy. Tonight she turns and presses her face against Ty’s chest and holds him tighter.)

By the next afternoon, she is sitting in an armchair in a well-lit office on the upper west side. 

"So," the dark-haired woman on the other side of the coffee table asks, crossing her legs, "What brings you to therapy?" Joan takes a moment before answering.

"I’m can’t sleep," she says, then pauses. Takes a deep breath, and then another. It’s difficult to get started. "I killed someone," she says at last. Dr. Reed looks at her, unfazed.

"Well," she says, "let’s get to work, then."


End file.
